Mozilla.org has gottena a facelift to coincide with the formation of the Mozilla Foundation. Among the improvements, it’s now much easier to download.

To obtain an SSH fingerprint, run ‘ssh-keygen -l‘ on a .pub file. For more fingerprinting fun, see ssh-keyscan.

I was speaking with a friend and he doubts that Bush won’t get re-elected because he believes that most of America is too happy with Bush. While I don’t entirely disagree about Bush’s re-election chances, I have to hope that my friend is “misunderestimating” the ability of the American public to see what’s going on, despite what FOX News might be saying (recent polls seem to some mixed signs).

BuzzMachine: AOL blogs (also blogged by an AOL employee)

Out of curiousity I just took the SelectSmart 2004 Presidential Selector. It’s not bad, although not that informational. It certainly could be made much better by specifically gridding out the issues, allowing something akin to a +/-5 type thing, and being interactive so you could pop up each candidates stance and see how they reflect to your opinions. That being said, it at least has some semblance of accuracy. It put me as most closely matched to Dean. By comparison, Bush was at 7%.

Who needs CGI when you have men in black suits? Check out this great ping-pong clip [3.5MiB WMV] from a Japanese NTV show.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about web-specific stuff, and well, mostly that’s because I haven’t been doing anything particularly new or exciting.

Currently at work I’m working on drop-down menus. While there are some pretty heavy duty scripts out there (like the hvmenu), best-practice suggests the use of semantically structured menus, a la gazingus’ or eric’s list-based DOM/CSS menus.

As an aside, I just ran some stats, and at least for the summer, our NS4 stats are much improved. It looks like we’re at about 3.5%, still higher than the average, but much lower than earlier this year (8%). A large effect is that with the students gone, the user labs aren’t being used. Thankfully, NS4 is scheduled for removal from lab machines for the fall.

In any case, all should be good an well. I have a JavaScript shunt for disabling the drop-downs for NS4, and the rest will just be straight lists. However, of course there’s complications. In this case, spacing. Looking through the css-d archives it seems that this is pretty unavoidable. That is, in the DOM, whitespace is read as #text. Oops. (related: table spacing).

There seem to be two options: 1) remove all the spaces in the source or 2) remove the spaces via the DOM. For simplicity, I chose a variation of the former, and used comments to preserve some sense of legibility. An ugly hack, yes, but well, nothing unusual when dealing with making things ‘look right’.

<ul>
  <li>Test 1</li>
  <li>Test 2</li>
  <li>Test 3</li>
</ul>

<ul><!--
  --><li>Test 1</li><!--
  --><li>Test 2</li><!--
  --><li>Test 3</li><!--
</ul>

Related:

• Developer-X: Degradable, OOP DHTML Tabs
• Kalsey: CSS Tabs with Submenus (demo)
• dive into mark: Pure CSS tabs, CSS tabs redux
• megnut: Are you crazy about CSS?

Upcoming: return of permalinks, playing w/ TypePad

• Open Government Information Awareness – Media Lab becomes relevant again
• OpenGroupware.org – finally an OSS exchange alternative? /. discussion
• Small Stories in printed form! Cool. I’ll be dropping by Golden Apple tomorrow, so I’ll be looking for it
• How to Photograph Fireworks – will have to try this out next year
• N.A.G. (Network Auralization for Gnutella), by Jason Freeman
• To install: Wonder Shaper
• PeerGuardian 2, a P2P lightweight firewall (seems fruitless), with list of bad IP’s
• Brian’s BitTorrent FAQ and Guide
• XUL Programmer’s Reference (via Bit Banger)
• OSCON 2003 Day Three
  

  Brian Aker, fresh on his new job as Senior Architect at MySQL, shocked the world (or, at least, me) when he announced that he’d embedded Perl in MySQL and was using it for stored procedures a couple of years ago. Of course, it did segfault rather often. Fortunately, it’s highly mature now. In his talk on “Making MySQL Do More”, Brian showed the embedded function API. You can write new functions for MySQL in Perl, Python, PHP, and Java. (Keep asking him about Ruby.) You can link to C libraries; he’s used Image Magick and zlib. I’m excited about how easily you can modify queries . SELECT DIFF(foo) … anyone?

• More ping pong shenanigans [2.4M ASF]

Current programming projects:

• Comic Book Reader – learning Cocoa/Objective-C, what better way to learn than to program something useful?
• Azureus – doing some work on this BitTorrent client to see if it can be easily ported to OS X.
• P2P Identity/Relationship Tool – as yet unnamed project, but it should be pretty cool
• blogging tool – finish blikiliner. To possibly add: bitflux/other integration, nEcho support, post aggregration (via bookmarklet? scraping?); do cool stuff w/ blo.gs rss cloud